I am a Lowrance and Humminbird customer.I don't think it would be fair to compare HB with Lowrance at this time. Give Lowrance a year or two to get the bugs out then compare them.I personally think its great we have them to choose from.I personally think the Side imagingis more important than any other view.They just help idenify the target.IMHO Gary

Welcome to the forum Ian! I hope you visit more here in the future . Best regards to Anne!

@chuck: Talking about customer service. G-Comm is the shop where I got my HB and they did an excellent job when I needed assistance with it (which was rare).

Regards from Lake Constance / Harry

Close Jolly Roger,

It is the G Comm you are talking about but it's not Ian.

I am the web developer at G Comm now responsible for maintaining the site and making it resourceful.Sadly, I don't know everything about the marine equipment available and this is why I wanted to see people's opinions on two very talked about products/brands.

I have passed on your regards to both Anne and Ian.We do intend to appear more within the forums and hopefully be able to pass on the customer support.

Great James!Thanks for passing the greetings. Unfortunately I'm not able to get out for scanning, mainly because the deepest water I've seen here in Kabul was a swimming pool .Hopefully I'll be back in business beginning of August.

Interesting remark regarding support. Up until last year - support for the HB units in the UK was fantastic - and one of the main reasons for purchasing HB units for alot of people over here in the UK. However, now the marine electronics side of HB UK has moved to Italy - this effectively means that UK HB customers have to send their units back to Italy to be repaired if they get a problem - I am in the midst of doing this right now (my HB 987 SI has a fault). I have been told that currently this takes about a month - so as you can imagine, I am a bit upset about being without my beloved 987 at probably the best time of year for fishing in the UK

I cannot comment on Lowrance units - as I do not own one - so I don't know if support in the UK is any better for them.

I also had very positive experiences for G-Comm in the UK - and would be interested to know from them if the move of HB UK MEL to Italy has negatively affected thier sales of HB units in the UK.

You chaps in the States don't knwo how lucky you are - or perhaps you do

Sorry for the delay in replying to the forum, i've been so busy adding more products to the web site.

With regards to Humminbird, yes the European distribution did move to Italy and there was a period of time where customer service did lapse for a period of time.It seems to have picked up a considerable amount now though. Fortunately.

The biggest downside we have seen as a company is that we used to be able to walk to the Humminbird distribution before the move to Italy - We were only over a bridge away.

Now when we don't have items in stock we have to order the products for our customers and then wait for around 4 working days to receive them. This isn't too bad if the customer hasn't put off ordering something until the very last minute.

Back to Lowrance's Structure Scan, we are currently looking to see if anyone would be interested in providing us with a review of the item? Perhaps sending us some images etc. I would like to feature this as a product review within our blog http://www.g-comm.co.uk/blog/ - another one of my tasks.

Depends on what he had the DI width set to. Narrow will give the best detail in the water column. That may be why the tree is not showing up as well.

I will say this, the Structure Scan does have a dedicated transducer for DownScan, so the Lowrance Image is going to be clearer. Especially since the test was done in 800khz. Since Humminbird does not have a dedicated transducer for the DI, at 800khz it is not covering quite as sharpe as the 455khz does because it is hitting the very edge of the side lobes at 800khz. It is 100% coverage, just not as good as at 455khz.

Chuck and I got to have this very conversation with the amazing technical guru from Humminbird who actually developed the SI and DI. David is an absolute genious and some of the conversation went right over our heads.